The title may be a bit misguiding as the infographic only shows Western typography but it seems that the most popular typefaces were invented either in Europe or North America. The poster includes information for each typefaces such as the year it was made, the location and the typographer. Luckily for the symmetry of the visualization, the typefaces are nearly split 50/50 between Europe and the United States. For all typography aficionados, Typefaces of the World will be available as a poster.

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http://twitter.com/acotgreave Andy Cotgreave

Hmmm. I followed the link via your RSS feed, expecting a table of fonts, and maybe a visualisation that showed me what each of those fonts are. Instead, this is a pretty poster that tells me almost nothing. I don’t want to tilt my head 90 degrees in order to read the name of most of these fonts. My experience of looking at this poster was to read the name of just the font on the right hand side of the list, because that’s the only one that’s almost horizontal.

And who, apart from professional typographers, could read any font name, and know what that font looked like? A list of 50 font names is meaningless without the font on display.

And what determines the order of the fonts?

In order to improve this, and enable readers to gain any insight, it should be changed to a table, and the font should be shown. That would so much more effective….

http://www.artillery.ch/ Wiederkehr

Thanks for your thoughts, Andy.

I agree with a lot of your inputs and also see room for improvements. The poster does not strive to be the most practically useful representation of the information about typefaces, but rather lies the emphasis on mapping their origin and giving it a distinct look.

http://twitter.com/gztwincities Ground Zero Group

This was placed on Reddit, but clicking on it… I’m not sure what real information was supposed to be there, or its use. Then I read, “available as a poster,” and knew. Its not an infographic so much as trendy typographic wall art.

I wonder if ordering the typefaces in chronological order around the circular layout in the middle would add value to the visualisation, as oppose to ordering it in alphabetical order. Least you get a time × Euro/US comparison.